Valve has apparently approved its first uncensored adult game on the Steam store.

On Friday, Dharker Studios is slated to start selling an uncensored version of its game Negilgee: Love Stories, which features nudity and sex scenes.

The adult title arrives as Valve has decided to no longer censor games that include controversial content. Instead, the company seeks to give consumers more control over which games they wish to see and buy on the digital store.

"Valve shouldn't be the ones deciding this. If you're a player, we shouldn't be choosing for you what content you can or can't buy," Valve executive Erik Johnson wrote in June.

Adult games have actually been available on Steam for years, but any explicit pornographic content in the game generally had to be removed. To access the sex scenes, you'd usually have to download a separate patch from the developer's own web page.

This was true for Negilgee, which launched as a censored product on Steam in 2016. However, Dharker Studios tweeted on Monday that Valve had given it the green light to do away with the patches and start selling a "100 percent uncensored" version of the game.

An indie developer called Kagura Games, meanwhile, said "some developers have already put up their uncensored games up for review, so we'll be following that closely, and consult with Steam to decide what the best course of action is for releasing our future titles on Steam."

So far, Valve hasn't publicly commented on the upcoming Negilgee release, so it isn't clear if other uncensored adult games will soon be allowed on Steam. In the past, the company took a stricter stance on limiting pornographic content. For instance, back in May, the company briefly threatened to remove anime-style adult games from the store. Prior to that, Valve began barring developers from publicly sharing links to download the uncensored patches to their adult games over Steam.

But now Valve is opening the door to all kinds of gaming content, for better or worse. To prevent controversial games from creeping into your Steam store recommendations, the company has been adding new tools to help buyers better curate what they'd like to see on the platform.

By default, games with "adult only sexual content" will not appear. To see them, you'll have to directly search for the title; Steam will then serve up a warning and explain the sexual content the game contains.

You can also control what you see on the Steam store by going into your Steam account's preferences. Under the Mature Content section, toggle what games you'd like to view.

About the Author

Michael has been a PCMag reporter since October 2017. He previously covered tech news in China from 2010 to 2015, before moving to San Francisco to write about cybersecurity. He covers a variety of tech news topics, including consumer devices, digital privacy issues, computer hacking, artificial intelligence, online communities and gaming.
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